man musicologist, who insisted that he
had discovered "undertones," sympa-
thetic vibrations that could be heard be-
neath a single note, just as "overtones"
are known to resonate above it. For a
while, Riemann s "undertones" were a
mainstay of music theory, until modern
acoustic analysis made it plain that no
undertones exist, and that Riemann had
somehow wished them into existence,
and then into his ears and those of his
students. Listening and wanting are in-
tricately entangled, in ways that may
evade any measure. Talking to Choueiri,
I had learned a lot about how we listen
to music but was still struggling with the
other question: why we listen to it. Who
could teach me something about that
deeper level, not just where sound be-
comes music but where music becomes
meaning?
I discovered that perhaps the densest
concentration of sound scholars in the
world could be found in my home town
of Montreal, at McGill University, where
I, along with five brothers and sisters,
went to school. (And where my parents
taught for many decades.) One reason for
this was the presence of the psychologist
Albert Bregman, a former professor of
mine, who spent almost fifty years at Mc-
Gill studying the psychology of sound,
and whose masterwork, the eight-hun-
dred-page "Auditory Scene Analysis:
The Perceptual Organization of Sound,"
remains a basic text in the field.
Bregman was a mentor to many of
the significant figures in the growth of
what has come to be called "cognitive
science," that new discipline in which
psychology, philosophy, computer sci-
ence, and, sometimes, sociology and
evolutionary biology all meet. At a less
exalted level, he also gave me some of
the best advice I ve ever received. Trying
to decide whether to major in psychol-
ogy or art history, I had gone to his
office to see what he thought. He
squinted and lowered his head. "Is this
a hard choice for you?" he demanded.
Yes! I cried. "Oh," he said, springing
back up cheerfully. "In that case, it
doesn t matter. If it s a hard decision,
then there s always lots to be said on
both sides, so either choice is likely to be
good in its way. Hard choices are always
unimportant."
Montreal has changed in the twenty-
five-plus years since I left, and mostly
for the better---for one thing, there is
more good food in the city than there
ever was before, most of it genuinely
rooted in the culture of Quebec, where
the fancy food used to be touched by a
colonial cringe toward France. But the
places I had known and the people I
had grown up with in the old Anglo-
phone quarters were largely gone. I
walked down St. Catherine Street, the
main drag of Montreal, now drabber
than it once was, and past the site of a
long-vanished sheet-music store, In-
ternational Music, where upstairs, in a
kind of keyboard bordello, you used to
be able to rent one of a chipped set of
rickety, out-of-tune pianos for half an
hour at a time. I would spend happy
afternoons away from school dallying
with the Jerome Kern and P. G. Wode-
house song "Bill," with its sharp edge of
the dominant-seventh chords and its
pretty major-seventh cadence. How
the chords had amazed me by their in-
stant assertion of emotion: the poignant,
wistful C-major seventh (making its re-
signed move to F-major seventh) had
got me through teen-age heartbreak. In
those days, even buying records was al-
most as exciting, and usually as frustrat-
ing, as chasing girls. I could still recall
finding a copy of the long-out-of-print
"Ella Sings Gershwin," with Ellis Lar-
kins, and racing home, to find out what
"Someone to Watch Over Me" sounded
like when played by someone who knew
how. Music represented for me not
the endless, shifting weather-cover of
sound that it does for my kids, a cloud
in every sense, a perpetual availability of
emotion to suit a mood and moment.
Music meant difficulty---and, when the
difficulty was overcome, the possibili-
ties of life, too. It was something to
master.
The faculty club at McGill, a cozy
converted brownstone, hadn t changed
since my father lunched there, on fad-
ing Anglo-Canadian specialties. (I re-
called once ordering steak-and-kidney
pie, and picking past the kidneys.) I
hadn t seen Bregman since my wedding
day, thirty years earlier. He had aged
and whitened over that time, but his
mind was as gently acute as I remem-
bered. Among highly intelligent people,
there are two kinds of minds, the sharp
and the soft. We expect smart people to
have minds like swords, made to fight
and slash and slay. Soft smart minds,
though, are of another, rarer kind. They
absorb great quantities of data and opin-
ion, often silently, even sluggishly, and
turn them around slowly until a solution
appears. Darwin is probably the best
instance of the soft style in science his-
tory, and Bregman is very much in this
soft-mind tradition. Sitting down for
lunch, I haltingly tried to describe
Choueiri s work in 3-D sound, and he
quietly nodded. "Yes, I suppose he must
be finding a way of re-creating the de-
lays in the appearance of the signal to
the ear," he said, "though I suppose he d
"Someday, son, all this will be yours."